A lovely article on one of my favorite places in the world.
NY Times June 26, 2012
Grazing in the Stacks of Academe
By BEN RATLIFF
In Still Life, a series of articles beginning this week, writers
for The Times sketch their favorite summer images.
The heat comes quickly in the summer. By early June, working at
home with no air-conditioning, I have no concentration. Everything
feels close and impolite and loud.
So I go to Butler Library, on the southern end of Columbia’s
campus in Morningside Heights. What began as a diversion has
become a self-preserving summer thing: not just Butler, but the
Butler stacks, the stillness capital of my imagination.
My job as a music critic depends on listening in crowds and
writing in solitude. It also involves gathering facts and context,
of which there is exponentially more every day. I think by
writing, and I write on a computer; the computer also contains the
Internet, which manufactures express-service context as well as
overstatement, sociopathy and lameness. In my hot office I was
starting to look at it abstractly, as a hot thing blowing exhaust.
I needed to renegotiate my relationship with space and sound and
information.
Butler is a 1930s neo-Classical hulk. At the front, above 14
columns, runs a list of writers and thinkers; the last is Vergil,
and I like that someone long ago took a stand and chose to spell
it in the Anglicization closer to his real name, not the more
common “Virgil.” It announces: nonsense not spoken here.
In the late ’80s, I’d been there a lot, studying and working as a
summer employee. When I turned up at the Library Information
office last year, there was much clucking about how I’d graduated
so very long ago that they needed a whole other database to find
my information. But that’s cool: I am from another time.
Pre-air-conditioning.
I had come to work but also to tune myself up. So I split the day.
Some for my bosses, some for me. After I met my deadline, writing
in the reference room, I walked behind the main desk into the
stacks. The Columbia library system owns over 10 million volumes;
1.5 million, humanities and history, live here. I moved around for
a few hours in the stillness, looking things up, standing up or
crouching the whole time, purely and almost dopily happy.
I’d forgotten. The Butler stacks are in a different sensory
category, starting from the threshold: If you’re tall, you bow
your head as you pass through the low door frame. They form an
enclosed rectangular prism at the center of Butler — no windows, a
bit cooler than the rest of the building. Two or three levels of
the inner stacks can correspond to one floor of the outer library.
All this reinforces the feeling that the stacks are something
special: a separate province or a vital inner organ.
Inside there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment.
You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it.
There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me
the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here
nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a
situation for adults.
Unlike the stacks at some other university libraries, Butler’s
were not built for public consumption. They opened to patrons
gradually, much later; originally, Butler had a call desk, where
you’d put in your requests and wait for your numbers to come up.
“That’s why they’re not pretty stacks,” said Karen Green, Butler’s
librarian for ancient and medieval history and for religion and
graphic novels. She said it with empathy. Both she and I know that
they are very beautiful.
I spent a few weeks there in the worst of last June and July,
grazing around, letting the shelves make the connections for me,
writing down notes for a book whose thesis grew obscure and
finally implausible: I was looking up works on plague, fire and
the Egyptian desert fathers. I learned well, but I felt even
better. I took in great amounts of information without ever
becoming fried or irritable. All that organization and nobody
around — it seemed like trespassing in the history of Western
learning, with no fear of cops. Not a lot of people spend time in
the stacks anymore. (Except, as Ms. Green pointed out, around the
graphic-novel section.) It’s not the current nature of finding
information.
Doing it the inefficient way, you use the senses. You look at a
row of spines, imprinted with butch, ultra-legible white or black
type; your eye takes in more at any time than can be contained on
a computer screen. You hold the books in your hand and feel the
weight and size; the typography and the paper talk to you about
time. A lot of libraries smell nice, but the smell of the Butler
stacks is a song of organic matter, changing as temperatures do
through the reaches of a pond. Get yourself near Goffredo
Casalis’s life’s work on the duchy of Savoy, the Dizionario
Geografico-Storico-Statistico-Commerciale, published in 27 volumes
from 1833 to 1854, and breathe in. A fantastic, pre-acidic-paper
smell: burned caramel, basically. Nobody there but you.
There are 15 floors of stacks with 64 rows of books per floor,
running about 25 feet each; 6 or 7 shelves in each row. Can you
actually browse there, find books on your own, faced with the dark
phalanxes? You can, once you get subject areas in your head.
Having made enough spot searches, you grasp the logic of each
floor. There are no signs to help you, only diagrams with codes
and numbers.
You can also create luck in any given spot: You turn your head to
the opposing row of books. A different subject area can arise,
perhaps only partly to do with your areas of interest. This is
non-link-based browsing. You can discover, instead of being
endlessly sought.
I’ve already gone back this year: Above 90 degrees was my cue. I
realize that I am lucky to do this free. If you have no
affiliation with the school, it will cost you $55 a month. You’d
pay more to go to the gym. I think it’s a good deal.